by Will Self
The big hand was on my neck again, twisting it like the focus grip of some humanoid camera. The autumnal trees, spindly, moulting, were cast into darkness as if the wan sun had been eclipsed. I felt myself being pulled backwards, upwards, so that my visual field did indeed resemble that of a camera, a camera in some computer-graphics title sequence. The Sussex campus was shrinking below me into a collection of children's play houses, then models, then crumbs, then fly droppings. Until the cars moving along the university's peripheral roads were silverfish and the whole scene was dappled with low-lying cloud. Then we were higher still and the earth curved away from us, showing a nimbus of atmosphere at its edge.
The Fat Controller spoke inside of me again. ‘Look up above you, look at the bare-faced cheek of the infinite.’ I did as he bade me. Up there, set among the unblinking stars like some branding of the cosmos, was that selfsame label, the label in my boxer shorts. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘retroscendence enables us to take any element in our visual field and, as it were, unpack its history. We have chosen your shorts, I now propose to instruct you in their origin and past life. Please do not be confused by the apparent dissolution of the integrity of your visual field. Remember that the purest of solipsism is indeed realism. For, if I am the world’ – we were heading down again, his nails digging into my flesh, I could make out the Eastern Mediterranean – ‘then the world must be real. Isn't that so?’
In the flat land of the Delta the babies cry themselves to sleep in the airless shade, while everyone else labours in the scintillating sun. When the dun evening comes the kids go down to the irrigation channels for some bilharzia bathing. They have little to look forward to, save for fat legs, flopping in the silt of some riverine beach.
My shorts were distributed over a half-acre of plants in the sharp silvery light of this place, in the form of white balls, fibrous globs. So fluffy to see but so hard to the touch.
‘Regard those buds,’ said The Fat Controller, ‘for throughout the long day of pluck and twist they turn into barbs and after years of this constant abrading, a deadened rind is added to the pluckers’ hands. This is the cotton workers’ equivalent of Repetitive Stress Syndrome. In due course we will witness similar, half a world away on the Mile End Road.’
I next found myself lying at the bottom of a crude hopper of duck boards which was set on top of an irrigation dyke. The fruit of these people's labour ('Their name is El Azain,’ he said, and his voracious lips seemed to suck on my lobes, his sharp tongue to probe my synapses) fell about my face. Then we were off, emptied along with the cotton into the truck that transported the El Azains’ harvest, together with that of the five other families that made up this producers’ co-operative, to the local town to meet the buyer.
The town was an organic place. A compost heap of soft walls that gently crumbled, flowing down to join the mud at their feet. Eventually the earth would be dug out, remoulded and cast once more in the form of bricks, which would take their place in fresh walls that in due course would crumble again.
Our dyad looked on as Mohammed Sherif, the co-operative head, aged and bloated by dietary tedium, went through the formalities with the buyer. They drank thé à menthe from dirty glasses, while a charcoal lump fizzed in the clay bowl of the hookah. From time to time Sherif's woolly old head, loosely wrapped in a dirty headdress, would fall back against the fly-speckled surface of the remaining quarter of a red sign. This dolorous thing proclaimed ‘oca-Cola’ in Arabic.
As this went on, the point of view without extension that was myself and The Fat Controller accompanied the product-of-the future as it was unloaded from the truck and heaped in a stall of warped boards. A man with one nostril pulled a stiff tarpaulin over us.
‘There is no other buyer, d'ye see?’ said The Fat Controller. ‘The bargaining isn't even a formality, it's just an empty ritual. Sherif must accept the price he is offered if the five families are to have any hope of paying off their lengthening tab at the provisioner's and if – haha, a'haha – they want their thin children to live to grow thinner! Look here’ – we peeked out – ‘he's thinking to himself: This may be my last harvest. No such luck, I'm afraid.’
The Fat Controller and I next became the cotton entirely. We were jolted from the Delta to the coast, where we disappeared into a giant galvanised iron shed. Here we were subjected to a process of pounding and separating, carding and spinning. Until at last I saw him shooting off ahead of me in the form of a long lumpy thread, vibrating with moisture, which stretched ectoplasmically into the maw of the shuttling frame. He cried out, ‘Here we go!’ and I followed on. The machinery clanked up and over and up and over again, gulping down first him, then the shorts-to-be, then me.
‘Bloody lucky’ – he spoke like a harp out of the strings of half-constructed fabric – ‘that this old Schliemann-Hoffer has already caught its finger quota for today. D'ye see, little hands have to struggle to free the trapped weft before the frame drops? If they aren't quick enough – ouch! Blood as good as yours or mine creatin’ a sort of moiré effect and condemning your shorts to the wastage pile.’
Before we set off again, on along the coast and then across the sea, The Fat Controller saw fit to bifurcate our strange awarenesses. So that, while one part of me remained intimate with the cotton, another separate centre of cartoon existence accompanied those tokens which served, through their concatenation and order, to mirror parallel developments in the world of objects. So it was that I lay in honeycombs of tiny compartments, stacked into loose piles and sheaves with onion-skin leaves of paper. I waited to be clipped and pinned, stamped and spiked. Latterly I was digitalised and pulsed my way across the dark convexities of visual-display units. I thought to myself, even as it happened, that this winking of my very self-consciousness was a nice expression of the value I represented.
Meanwhile my cotton body was wound on to great bolts, each one five metres long. Although the bolts were thick, I still bent in the middle when I was lifted and carried, a man at either of my ends. I was wadded along with my fellows into a container and then – darkness. A long, long, unutterably tedious wait in the lint-filled darkness, until at last I felt the tension of the crane and realised that I was being lowered into the hold.
A juggernaut roaring, an ultrasonic shuddering, the smell of air-borne hydrocarbons, the sensation of pores opening to admit grit.
‘All right?’ asked The Fat Controller. ‘Not a lot to see in the hold of that ratty freighter, was there?’
‘No.’
‘That's why I've brought you here.’
Here was the Old Kent Road. We were looking across it at a slice-shaped building, calcined with pollution. It stood like a slice of stale chocolate cake, marooned in a tar ox-bow, that had become a cul-de-sac when the main throughfare ploughed another course. Over the portico, cut into the rendering, were the words ‘Success House’.
‘Good that, isn't it?’ His voice was muffled by something could it be that he was smoking a cigar even whilst disembodied? ‘A nice irony. The facade proclaims success, but behind it the building dwindles to nothing. Consider those stately columns, regard the coils of plaster vine that trail from the windowsills, meditate on the dados in the shape of fasces that stud its pitted hide.’
‘Ye-es.’
‘Does not the whole ensemble speak to you of imperial confidence, a global network of industry?’
‘S’pose so.’
‘And yet all there is inside is one old Jew. Zekel is his name.
‘I know that. What I mean is, when I was a number on one of those screens, I saw his name alongside me.’
‘Quite so, for it is he who is responsible for importing the schmutter that will be made into your shorts. He is a cotton factor; and look over there.’ I found myself looking. ‘Here, if I am not much mistaken, comes his customer.’
A youngish Greek man was sidling a blue Porsche into the alleyway alongside Success House. The car was so low it looked as if a giant had tried to stub it out and it was cl
ear that getting out of the bucket seat gave the Greek momentary altitude sickness. He looked around warily as he locked up.
‘See him glance round like that? He's worried that if Zekel knows he has a Porsche, the Jew will drive a harder bargain and the haggling between them – which is already prolonged – will become interminable.
‘The Greek’s name is Vassily Antinou and let me tell you, he's an even deeper mine of stupid contradiction than you are. His father quarreled with the Colonels over some detail of graft. Naturally the adolescent Antinou, stranded in plump London, elevated the exile into something political. It's so typically English that this rebel should end up with his own sweat shop in Clapton – you'll see it for yourself in due course. All his socialist rhetoric has faded into spurious concerns over the man-management of twenty women-in-nylon. Poor Cypriots who have no option but to look on, while their boss – who is suited by Anzio, shod by Hoage's, and shirted by Barries’ – rants up and down the linoleum batting at the flexes of their sewing machines, and talking of productivity deals and workers’ share options. Pathetic, eh?’
We were inside Success House looking out. Those selfsame stately columns framed a view of the immense rumpled surface of South London. The factor sat behind a roll-top desk; he was so bent and atrophied by arthritis that he looked like a crustacean clad in a suit.
‘Whaddya want, Vassily?’ He clearly thought the Greek who leant against the doorjam was a hoot. He picked a newly constructed swatch of samples up from the desk in front of him and chucked it at Antinou, who caught the flopping thing one-handed and proceeded to fondle it familiarly.
‘This one,’ said Antinou, pulling out a sample and rubbing it between his finger and thumb.
‘That's called “getting the silk”,’ said The Fat Controller, sotto voce, ’now watch, he'll yank it hard to check the tensility.’ He was right.
‘Egyptian cotton,’ sighed Zekel. ‘I bought it myself at auction – it's still bonded.’ Antinou went on fondling the piece of cloth that was once a fluffy ball on the flat delta.
‘How much?’ he said at length. The Factor named a price, Antinou countered and so it went on for quite a while.
The Fat Controller and I were back inside the bolt when it arrived from the bonded warehouse at Felixstowe. The van doors swung open and as Antinou's lads eased us out we were treated to a 6 a.m. view of Clapton. It looked profoundly underexposed, like a photograph rejected by Quality Control.
‘See him,’ said The Fat Controller. A languid black man was floating around, elegantly suited. ‘That's Crispin. He's the originator of the Barries’ look, he's the man behind your shorts.’
‘Hold up, lads!’ The black man let his hand fall on the bolt of cotton. He pulled a fold of cloth loose and, with tender movements, as if he were sensually unwrapping some erogenous zone, he felt the cloth. He bunched it and pulled at it, finally he pleated it between his knuckles, before letting it fall back. He went off in the direction of some green doors that bore the legend ‘Narcissus Clothing’, muttering, ‘That'll do, that'll do. ‘
‘You see,’ said The Fat Controller once Crispin had disappeared, ‘your shorts already had shape and form – in his mind. Now he's found their substance. Shall we go on?’
We were on the King's Road. The frontage of Barries’ Menswear was pseudo-cottagey, a waist-high tracery of white plaster and black beams surmounted by plate-glass windows. ‘There he is, that's Barry – Barry Mercer.’ A plump man, piscine, his tail end fading to little leather pumps, came out of the shop gesticulating, clutching his sweating ginger head. Crispin followed behind. ‘Of course his real name is Morgenstern. His father was a bespoke tailor on the Mile End Road. You know I was talking of cotton and Repetitive Stress Syndrome? Well, Mercer's father had exactly the same rinds of dead flesh on his hands that we saw in the Delta.
‘Barry couldn't change his name until his father died – and he certainly wouldn't have brought Crispin home. His father would have said, “We sell to schwartzers, we don't do business with them.” But Barry's mother is too polite for that, whenever Crispin goes round he gets schneken and the photo album like anyone else. Shall we listen in?’
‘Accessorise, that's what you do if you want to establish a designer concept,’ said Crispin. His nostrils were cavernous and so finely edged that they seemed made of paper.
‘But what can we accessorise?’ Mercer whined. ‘I had to go up to Clapton yesterday and haggle with Antinou for hours over that bloody Egyptian cotton. Whaddya want it for? We don't have a range of clothes, a collection, that requires accessories.’
‘No matter.’ Crispin was imperturbable, ‘We'll just do the accessories. Antinou can turn out boxer shorts for less than 50p a unit. We can do shirts and socks as well – ‘
His words were abruptly cut off. We were back at the university, sitting on the bench as if nothing had happened. The empty ornamental pond was choked with rotten leaves, starlings blew about the place like avian litter. The Fat Controller had a large gunmetal cigar case open in one hand. He was studying it reverently, as if it were some breviary of tobacco. He said, ‘You have to remember that selecting the right cigar is an act of intuition rather than analysis. It's no good looking at the cigars available and attempting to choose one on the basis of certain criteria. Rather, you must wait for the cigar that is – so to speak – ordained, to speak to you. To say “smoke me”. This one’ – he picked one up gingerly, near to the tip – ‘says it is the reincarnation of Cleopatra's asp. I'll buy that.’ He lit it with his Zippo.
‘I thought connoisseurs never lit their cigars with petrol lighters.’
‘Whassat? Oh well, yes, I suppose strictly speaking that is true but it's a mistake to view a sensual pleasure as being a single datum. Rather, every such experience is manifold. If your palate is sufficiently developed you can distinguish the tobacco from the petrol. I myself have rather a taste for petrol. Picked it up during a little sojourn among the Australian aboriginals . . . but anyway, we digress. What did you think of my little lesson: “The History of the Product”?’
‘It was very interesting. Was it an hallucination?’
‘Don't be so bloody stupid! What's the point in my spending time on you, cultivating you, being perfectly decent towards you, if you're going to manifest such infantile credulousness, eh?’
‘I don't call depriving me of my girlfriend being perfectly decent.’
‘Still hung up on that, are you? Come now, you cannot possibly imagine that anything could have come of your relation with that chit. In your heart of hearts you know yourself to be incapable of such mutuality, such abandonment of self – ’
‘But what about my “elective affinity"?’
‘That's altogether different.’
‘Because that's what you want?’
‘Quite so. Now, as to “The History of the Product,” an ability to retroscend in this fashion will be of inestimable value to you, it will mean that when you are engaged in assessing the demand for a particular product you can look at similar and instantly unpack the portfolio of its genesis. There is of course another aspect to this, the cultural superstructure that corresponds to this historical basis. I refer, of course, to the discreet advertisements in the quality press, people mouthing fatuously “Oh Barries"’, when they see what shirt you're wearing, the flyers Mercer manages to insinuate on to the information desks in some of the major London hotels, and so on and so forth.
‘Naturally your shorts are a very simple example of this. When it comes to products that are in more diffuse circulation the retroscendent experience can be considerably more disorientating. Although a skilled retroscender may learn how to pilot himself through all the historical imagery available I fear that lies some way off for you. In the meantime – until you have made your bones, that is – you will needs have to confine yourself to asking my assistance when you wish to retroscend, got that? Good. Now’ – he brought himself face to face with his Rolex – tempus fucks it. I have a plane to catch.
I will see you anon.’ He could never say goodbye or hello, he just came – and went. I was left on the memorial bench, more isolated than ever.
Naturally June couldn't understand why it was that I went on cutting her. And cut her I did. I even had to resort to missing seminars and tutorials, so as to avoid having to speak to her. Initially she was simply bewildered by this but soon she was plain angry. She left a series of notes in my pigeonhole that started off plaintively: ‘I'm very confused by what happened between us the other night. I thought you were a caring sort of person, I can't understand why you won't speak to me now. Is it something to do with the sex?’ (how right she was) but ended up abusively: ‘Ian Wharton, you are the fucking male chauvinist pig to end all fucking male chauvinist pigs. You take a woman out and then dump her. Don't you care at all how people feel?’
If only she could have known how much I cared. If only she could have seen me skulking around at Cliff Top, the very picture of melancholy. Sitting drooped over walls, utterly dejected. I felt the full force of her criticism. Somewhere in my abdomen was a sac of warm caring, a bladder of emotional nutrition, distended with the urge to burst and engender another's heart. But I was constrained, fearfully constrained.
Cut off more than ever from the society of my peers, I fell back on my mother. Since I had been at the university we had seen far less of each other. It was an extension – or so I thought - of the tact she had always shown to me as a child that she didn't impose. However, when I took to hanging about in the new house, when I watched her while she chatted to her staff and guests, or entertained the local burghers, or genteely remonstrated with her suppliers and various tradesmen over the phone, I began to see this seeming tact as an extension of that complicity I had long been aware of. Mother, I sensed, didn't just know a little about Mr Broadhurst, she knew all about him. That's why she was the first to know he was moving out.